Friday, October 10, 2008

Our mind - the true culprit


"Everything in Nature is in perfect harmony with each other, except we humans...", I came across this statement and I thought how true this statement is. It is because of us humans that the Nature has entered in an inequilibrium. Everywhere, people are talking about global warming, ice-sheets melting, sea-levels rising, glaciers receding etc. etc.
If there is anyone who is responsible for these things, it is us - humans. For over billions of years till the human being happened on planet earth, everything had a natural rate. If there was an ice-age, there was melt-down too. Even when man happened, he lived peacefully with the Nature and everything was green and rosy.

But the problem started when we humans started interfering with the natural state of stability. It is said that the rate of rise in global temperature over the last few decades has been higher than all the thousands of years put together before that.

Our greed and fear has led to this sad state. The Nature has always blessed us with whatever we wanted but the problem is our list of wants is so loooooooooooooooong that She has no answer now. Our greed has taken over so much that once we get something, we immediately look for the next thing and we call this modernization.

Earlier, man killed animals but for his livlihood only. He cut trees only to get enough space for him to grow crops and survive. He made machines and looked for comforts but only those that would ease his physical strain at the end of a hard day out.

Now, we are cutting trees to build resorts, casinos and shopping malls. Most of the times, a shopping mall is totally unwarranted given there are hundreds of malls around but still we are building them.

I have nothing against modernization. It is because of that I am writing this post. But what we are doing is not fulfilling our needs. All we are doing is pleasing our senses. It is a mental problem that we have. It is the negativity that we are constantly building which causes us that irritation, which make us live on greed and fear. Paramahamsa Nithyananda repeatedly says, "Fear and greed drive the modern man."

That is true. Our greed to get more and more, if not others will take it and our fear to hold on to what we have is the real problem. We are simply exploiting the Nature to fulfill our mental pleasures only. And the most important thing we miss in this whole process is, how much ever we try to fulfill our mental pleasures, they can never be fulfilled because they are non-existent in the first place.

Time and again, enlightened masters have said our mind is an illusion. Intellectual science also is slowly converging to this conclusion. When the mind itself is an illusion, our so-called problems created by our mind should also be a mirage.

We are constantly torturing Mother Nature in an attempt catch the mirage but is the mirage there?
The only solution to this question is for us to ask ourselves what we really want. All this running around is because of our belief in the quest for eternal joy in the outside world. All this running is doing is to stamp Mother Nature again and again. Once we realize that eternal bliss within us, our running stops, we fall in tune with Mother Nature; we fall in total harmony like everything else in Nature. Meditation is a way to realize that eternal bliss, that nithyananda.

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